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In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless

In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.

Gareth321 3y ago
IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.
goykasi 3y ago
But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.
esskay 3y ago
The email analogue doesn't really work for your every day person. They dont know, or even want to know how it works. When people visit a Mastedon site and see something like this its an instant turn off: > mastodon.social is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. Nobody cares, or wants to care that its decentralized. They just want a social network. When you've got to screw around with 'picking a site' to sign up on its hassle. When you've got to mess around to find something because its on a different node, its a hassle. As someone else said, they need to shut up and stop the key point being that its a fediverse - the average user has no idea what that means, nor should they need to. There's also the woefully underdeveloped user experience aspect of things, and overexplaining. On the signup page for example you see this: >With an account on this Mastodon server, you'll be able to follow any other person on the network, regardless of where their account is hosted. I dont care. I dont need to know that, if its a given that I can talk to people on other instances then I dont need to be told. It's got a long, long way to go before its even close to gaining critical mass.

Gareth321 3y ago

IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.

goykasi 3y ago

But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.

esskay 3y ago

The email analogue doesn't really work for your every day person. They dont know, or even want to know how it works. When people visit a Mastedon site and see something like this its an instant turn off: > mastodon.social is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. Nobody cares, or wants to care that its decentralized. They just want a social network. When you've got to screw around with 'picking a site' to sign up on its hassle. When you've got to mess around to find something because its on a different node, its a hassle. As someone else said, they need to shut up and stop the key point being that its a fediverse - the average user has no idea what that means, nor should they need to. There's also the woefully underdeveloped user experience aspect of things, and overexplaining. On the signup page for example you see this: >With an account on this Mastodon server, you'll be able to follow any other person on the network, regardless of where their account is hosted. I dont care. I dont need to know that, if its a given that I can talk to people on other instances then I dont need to be told. It's got a long, long way to go before its even close to gaining critical mass.